FUll length animated feature

Family audiences

Hollywood films were still largely aimed at family audiences, and it was often the more old-fashioned films that produced the studios’ biggest successes. Productions like Mary Poppins (1964), My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965) were among the biggest money-makers of the decade.

1972

Personal visions and creative insight led to huge success

Film director’s begin to express their personal vision and creative insights. The development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped to give these directors far greater control over their projects than would have been possible in earlier eras. This led to some great critical and commercial successes, like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Coppola’s The Godfather films, Polanski’s Chinatown, Spielberg’s Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas’s Star Wars.

1977

first surround sound movie

the first film to use dolby surround sound was made. It was star wars iv.

1980

VCR

Saw audiences began increasingly watching films on their home VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the film studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of films on home video became a significant “second venue” for exhibition of films, and an additional source of revenue for the film industries.

1982

CGI

The first film to us CGI (computer generated imagery) was Disneys Tron.

1990

independent films

Saw the development of a commercially successful independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997), independent films like Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and on home video.

1994

major studios create "independent films"

Major American studios began to create their own “independent” production companies to finance and produce non-mainstream fare. One of the most successful independents of the 1990s, Miramax Films, was bought by Disney the year before the release of Tarantino’s runaway hit Pulp Fiction in 1994.

1995

computer animated feature

The first feature length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney. After the success of Toy Story, computer animation began to grow and became the principal technique for feature length animation, which allowed competing film companies such as Dreamworks Animation and 20th Century Fox to effectively compete with Disney with successful films of their own.

2001

Issues

Saw the beginning of a growing problem of digital distribution to be overcome with regards to expiration of copyrights, content security, and enforcing copyright. There is higher compression for films, and Moore’s law allows for increasingly cheaper technology.

2005

First Imax

The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to have been at least partially shot in IMAX technology.